"They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want."
- Dick Cheney
"Go fuck yourself."
- Dick Cheney
US Acknowledges Torture
24 June 2005, Agence France Presse
Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.
The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
"They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,"' the Committee member told AFP.
"They will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark."
UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities.
The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006.
Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee.
The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings.
Interrogators Cite Doctors' Aid at Guantánamo Prison Camp
24 June 2005, Neil A. Lewis, New York Times
WASHINGTON - Military doctors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in conducting and refining coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to new, detailed accounts given by former interrogators.
The accounts, in interviews with The New York Times, come as mental health professionals are debating whether psychiatrists and psychologists at the prison camp have violated professional ethics codes. The Pentagon and mental health professionals have been examining the ethical issues involved.
The former interrogators said the military doctors' role was to advise them and their fellow interrogators on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes by exploiting their fears, in the hopes of making them more cooperative and willing to provide information. In one example, interrogators were told that a detainee's medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.
In addition, the authors of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine this week said their interviews with doctors who helped devise and supervise the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo showed that the program was explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees as a means to obtaining intelligence.
The accounts shed light on how interrogations were conducted and raise new questions about the boundaries of medical ethics in the nation's fight against terrorism.
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Several ethics experts outside the military said there were serious questions involving the conduct of the doctors, especially those in units known as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, BSCT, colloquially referred to as "biscuit" teams, which advise interrogators.
"Their purpose was to help us break them," one former interrogator told The Times earlier this year.
The interrogator said in a more recent interview that a biscuit team doctor, having read the medical file of a detainee, suggested that the inmate's longing for his mother could be exploited to persuade him to cooperate.
Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former Army brigadier general in the medical corps, said in an interview that "this behavior is not consistent with our medical responsibility or any of the codes that guide our conduct as doctors."
The use of psychologists and psychiatrists in interrogations prompted the Pentagon to issue a policy statement last week that officials said was supposed to ensure that doctors did not participate in unethical behavior.
While the American Psychiatric Association has guidelines that specifically prohibit the kinds of behaviors described by the former interrogators for their members who are medical doctors, the rules for psychologists are less clear.
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Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health matters, said the new Pentagon guidelines made clear that doctors might not engage in unethical conduct. But in a briefing for reporters last week, he declined to say whether the guidelines would prohibit some of the activities described by former interrogators and others. He said the medical personnel "were not driving the interrogations" but were there as consultants.
The guidelines include prohibitions against doctors' participating in abusive treatment, but they all make an exception for "lawful" interrogations. As the military maintains that its interrogations are lawful and that prisoners at Guantánamo are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, those provisions would seem to allow the behavior described by interrogators and the medical journal. The article in the medical journal, by two researchers who interviewed doctors who worked on the biscuit program, says, "Since late 2002, psychiatrists and psychologists have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence."
Italian Judge Orders Arrest of 13 CIA Agents
24 June 2005, Aidan Lewis, AP
An Italian judge on Friday ordered the arrests of 13 CIA officers for secretly transporting a Muslim preacher from Italy to Egypt as part of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts— a rare public objection to the practice by a close American ally.
The Egyptian was spirited away in 2003, purportedly as part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible torture.
The arrest warrants were announced Friday by the Milan prosecutor's office, which has called the disappearance a kidnapping and a blow to a terrorism investigation in Italy. The office said the imam was believed to belong to an Islamic terrorist group.
The 13 are accused of seizing Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, on a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, and sending him to Egypt, where he reportedly was tortured, Milan prosecutor Manlio Claudio Minale said in a statement.
The U.S. Embassy in Rome and the CIA in Washington declined to comment.
The prosecutor's statement did not name the suspects, give their nationalities or mention the CIA by name. But an Italian official familiar with the investigation confirmed newspaper reports Friday that the suspects worked for the CIA.
The official also said there was no evidence Italians were involved or knew about the operation. He asked that his name not be used because official comment was limited to the prosecutor's statement.
Minale said the suspects remain at large and Italian authorities will ask the United States and Egypt for assistance in the case.
The prosecutor's office said Nasr was released by the Egyptians after his interrogation but was arrested again later.
The statement said Nasr was seized by two people as he was walking from his home toward a mosque and bundled into a white van. He was taken to Aviano, a joint U.S.-Italian base north of Venice, and flown to a U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany, before being taken to Cairo.
It said investigators had confirmed the abduction through an eyewitness account and other, unidentified witnesses as well as through an analysis of cell phone traffic.
In March 2003, "U.S. authorities" told Italian police Nasr had been taken to the Balkans, the statement said. A year later, in April-May 2004, Nasr phoned his wife and another unidentified Egyptian citizen and told them he had been subjected to violent treatment by interrogators in Egypt, the statement said.
Italian newspapers have reported that Nasr, 42, said in the wiretapped calls that he was tortured with electric shocks.
On Friday, the Milan daily Corriere della Sera cited another Milan-based imam as telling Italian authorities Nasr was tortured after refusing to work in Italy as an informer. According to the testimony, he was hanged upside down and subjected to extreme temperatures and loud noise that damaged his hearing, Corriere reported.
Minale said the judge rejected a request for six more arrest warrants for suspects believed to have helped prepare the operation.
Judge Chiara Nobile ordered the arrests after investigators traced the agents through Milan hotels and Italian cell phones, said reports in Corriere and another daily, Il Giorno.
Il Giorno said all the agents were American and three were women.
Minale said a judge also issued a separate arrest warrant for Nasr on terrorism charges. In that warrant, Judge Guido Salvini said Nasr's seizure violated Italian sovereignty, according to Italian news agency Apcom.
Nasr was believed to have fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia and prosecutors were seeking evidence against him before his disappearance, according to a report in La Repubblica newspaper, which cited intelligence officials.
Corriere said Italian police picked up details, including cover names, photos, credit card information and U.S. addresses the agents gave to five-star hotels in Milan around the time of Nasr's alleged abduction. It said investigators also found the prepaid highway passes the agents used for the journey from Milan to the air base.
The report said investigations showed the agents incurred $144,984 in hotel bills in Milan, and that two pairs of agents took holidays in northern Italy after delivering Nasr to Aviano.
Italian-U.S. relations were strained after American soldiers killed an Italian intelligence agent near Baghdad airport in March. He was escorting a kidnapped Italian journalist after he had secured her release from Iraqi captors.
See also:
Thirteen With the C.I.A. Sought by Italy in a Kidnapping
25 June 2005, New York Times
tidbits
Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 100 terrorism suspects have been transferred by the United States to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other countries where, some former captives have said, they were tortured. Agency officials defend the practice, which began a decade ago, as a legal and effective way to thwart terrorists. The agency usually carries out the transfers with the permission of foreign governments, but Italian investigators said they were unaware of any agreement between Italy and the United States about Mr. Nasr.
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Mr. Nasr was transferred onto a Gulfstream IV executive jet for Cairo, the warrants say. The Gulfstream belongs to a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox, Philip H. Morse. The warrant noted that Mr. Morse had previously confirmed that his jet was regularly leased to the C.I.A., with the team's logo covered.
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They identified the suspects by examining all cellphones in use near the abduction, and then tracing the web of calls placed. Investigators said they were able to trace several calls by Americans on the road from Milan to Aviano, the joint American-Italian air base north of Venice.
The suspects stayed in five-star Milan hotels, including the Hilton, the Sheraton, the Galia and Principe di Savoia, in the week before the operation, at a cost of $144,984, the warrant says, adding that after Mr. Nasr was flown to Egypt, two of the officers took a few days' holiday at five-star hotels in Venice, Tuscany and South Tyrol.
The Italian investigators also collected photocopies of the operatives' passports, photographs, cellphone numbers and their MasterCard and VISA credit card numbers. Six other American officials - either C.I.A. officers or diplomats posted at the Milan consulate - are under investigation for helping support the abduction, Italian investigators said.
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